Playing loser games is a fun twist on your kids’ favorite board games. Loser Games can also bring new life to games that have sat on the shelf because your kids have outgrown them or simply grown tired of them.
The point to loser games is just like it sounds. If you lose, you win!
My kids started playing Loser Games when my son was very small and my daughter kept beating him at simple games. He was getting frustrated, and didn’t want to play anymore, and so my daughter told him that if he lost the next game, he was really a winner. They played and my son was thrilled to lose! Problem solved, and everyone came out a winner.
This idea works better with some games than with others. The easiest are straightforward games of chance like Chutes and Ladders, Candyland and Sorry, but some of the most fun to play this way combine a little skill with the luck, like Memory (you might accidentally get a match!) and Yahtzee. You will have to make some rules, for instance in Memory, a player can’t turn over the same pair of cards twice, and with Yahtzee, you have to take the best score you can with your rolls.
Monopoly works if you manipulate the rules so that if you have the money, you have to buy whatever you land on. Set a time limit for this one, and whoever has the least amount of money and assets after, say, thirty minutes, loses, and therefore, wins!
Checkers is a good one, if you make a rule that when the opportunity presents itself, you have to jump an opponent.
(Scrabble and Boggle and games of that nature won’t work for Loser Games because everyone can just sit around and feign stupidity.)
So try out a few of these games and let me know what worked well for your family. This is also a perfect activity for a backwards-themed birthday party of for backwards day at school. And if someone calls you a loser, remember, you’re really a winner!